Last Saturday I wrote a Journal article about CloudSocial and IMS Learning Tools Interoperability. I liked it a lot – I was asked to be “not so technical” – so I wrote the article focusing on the ideas behind CloudSocial and IMS LTI and how we hope it will change people’s perspective when they build content and craft learning experiences.
So I sent in my draft to my editor and he said “No”. He wanted a different article – one more focused on the standards and on the technical aspects and on the possibilities that IMS LTI opens up. Now those of you who know me well – know my nearly automatic reaction when someone tells me “No” :). But not in this case! He gave me really clear and honest guidance about what he wanted in the article. So I quickly decided to publish last week’s article as a white paper on the CloudSocial site as soon as my co-authors work on the text a bit. The nice thing about being a white paper is that we can stress all the concepts that underly the approach to CloudSocial even more strongly than if it were destined for publication in a Journal.
So this weekend, again I am writing a Journal Article – hopefully my editor will like this one better – it is more technical and focuses on what the IMS Tools Interoperability Spec is and how it works and some case-studies on how it has been used so far.
So far I am on my second cup of coffee and plugged back into the power supply since my battery was running our as I typed in my recliner – but I am up to 9 pages – aiming for about 15-16 pages and a complete first draft by noon so I can finish painting the Kitchen before I leave for the Conexions conference in Houston on Thursday and the IMS Quarterly meeting in Long Beach next Sunday.
Update: The article is finished – draft 0 at 11:30 AM – it is 15 pages long. I like how it turned out – lets see if the Journal editor likes it.
I include the Introduction of the article below. As always comments and suggestions are welcome.

IMS Learning Tools Interoperability: Giving Teachers and Learners More Flexibility
Introduction
Currently most learning management systems in the market are relatively mature and stable. LMS systems are increasingly becoming treated like other large-scale enterprise-wide applications. This means that the systems are managed much more conservatively – with fewer upgrades and less flexibility for instructors who want to experiment with new software, capabilities or content. Even though systems like BlackBoard, Moodle, Sakai or Angel are designed to be easily expanded in a modular fashion, production requirements tend to limit the ability for faculty and instructional staff to explore new approaches to learning.
There is a need to allow LMS systems to allow interesting innovation while at the same time keeping those systems very solid in daily production. We need to create learning environments where we can have both innovation and stability. The solution is to separate the functions of a learning management system and distribute them across multiple systems. Taking a service-oriented approach to learning tools allows production to be handled by one set os servers and experimentation to be handled by a different set of servers.
When we take a standards-based service-oriented approach to learning tools, it also creates markets for software as a service and content as a service. If we can reduce the cost of integrating externally hosted content and software into LMS systems, we should see a diverse set of publisher content and software services available to teachers and learners. Also we will likely see a set of open source learning tools that function across multiple learning management systems.
When this approach reaches full maturity, the LMS systems can provide the essential core functionality and external tools can provide many choices to teachers and learners. According to Dr. Andrew (Aggie) Booth of Leeds University, one of the principal designers of the Bodington Virtual Learning Environment (VLE):
“I certainly don’t see the VLE or LMS continuing in the form that they currently are, where you have a monolithic application with lots and lots of different tools presented to teachers and students. You very quickly come to the limits of any tool that you use. The answer is to abandon the tool you have been using and to swap in another tool. Now I can see a situation where you extend this from a single tool to all of the tools of an LMS. I can see a situation where the VLE or LMS actually shrinks to a container into which you plug these learning tools.” [10]
The IMS Learning Tools Interoperability [ref] is a standard under development that standardizes the protocols between the LMS system and the external tools allowing external tools to function as if the tool were a native tool inside the LMS.
While the IMS Learning Tools Interoperability Specification was under development, the IMS Developer Network published an informal specification called SimpleLTI [ref] which described a subset of the IMS LTI functionality in order to start a series of demonstrations and experiments to explore the architectural impact of a service-oriented approach to tools in a Learning Management System and inform the formal standards process.
This paper describes IMS Tool Interoperability and some of the engineering work that has been done to insure that the ultimate standard works well and is easily implemented.